The US Senate has confirmed the billionaire private astronaut Jared Isaacman to become Donald Trump’s Nasa administrator. The confirmation makes an advocate of Mars missions and an ally of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk the space agency’s 15th leader.
The vote on Isaacman, who Trump nominated, removed and then renamed for the post of Nasa administrator this year, passed 67-30, two weeks after he told senators in his second hearing that Nasa must pick up the pace in beating China back to the moon this decade.
Acting Nasa chief Sean Duffy, who also leads the US transportation department, congratulated Isaacman on Twitter/X, wishing Isaacman “success as he begins his tenure and leads NASA as we go back to the Moon in 2028 and beat China”.
Duffy had been lobbying to move the space agency under the permanent purview of his own bureau, a fight he lost with Isaacman’s confirmation. Duffy’s consolidation efforts sparked conflict with Musk at about the same time that the transport secretary had said that SpaceX had fallen behind on its contracts with Nasa and looked to the private company’s competitors, in particular Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, for alternatives.
Isaacman’s nomination for the role was previously pulled back in May during a period when Musk and Trump were in a public feud. Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Isaacman’s donations to Democratic candidates were the reasons behind the move. Isaacman re-emerged as a candidate in recent months, however, and, according to the Wall Street Journal, he tapped allies within the administration to promote his cause.
Isaacman’s fortune came from founding a payment processing startup called Shift4, which now handles billions of transactions each year. He has flown on two SpaceX missions, both of which he funded himself and contained all-civilian crews. The most recent was in 2024, a mission that involved the first spacewalk conducted by a private company.
